These Demented Lands (10 page)

‘Play it loud though I'm trying to sleep but – deal – I get to choose the music,' she held out a reflective disc that caught and threw about the fluorescent strip on the corridor ceiling above her. I realised it was a CD. She was wearing a big man's shirt and her legs were bare. She'd washed her hair and its shape had changed. I'd only seen her before in the darkness, at a distance. Now a longing I thought I'd conquered years before slapped into me, as if it were a sheet blown on a vast beach.

‘It's Beethoven. I loathe it but it's the only cassette in the place apart from the one Brotherhood plays up in the lounge; know what that's called?'

She looked at me. Later she would claim her eyes were dark blue but that night she knocked on my door my notes indicate they were darkest black (Brotherhood would always scoff, insist they were dark green).

I said, ‘The Emotion Collection'. I'm not sure if the CD works; there aren't any CDs, unless he's some hidden upstairs with all his Bob Dylan records,' I didn't know whether to retreat back into the room and try the CD; I was afraid she would leave. She shifted herself to look beyond me.

‘Hey, you've a video.'

‘He gave me it for my work.'

‘What films've you got?'

‘Ah, I don't have any.'

‘What?!'

‘None, I've no films.'

‘What's that?'

‘It's a sunken aircraft.'

‘A sunk aircraft. You know how to get your kicks, Ludwig, you really do.'

‘Do you want to watch it?' I shrugged, then was glad to find myself laughing.

‘That's your job isn't it? You investigate why planes crash.'

‘I'm a civil servant,' I shrugged, ‘How do you know?'

She tapped her forefinger against the side of her nose. The fingernail had ruins of nail varnish on it. She sighed and said, ‘No much else going on is there,' and stepped in the room.
She sat on the bed which wasn't made (I refused Mrs Heapie access to the room and the young woman was the first person to enter it) pressing down the end of the mattress.

I picked up the remote control and felt a bit foolish, as I rewound the footage, saw the camera scuttle surfacewards back up the anchor rope.

I let the tape run forwards. She watched without saying anything. I stared at the screen. When I stepped awkwardly in front of her to the CD machine she moved her head slightly to look past my leg. The CD spun wildly when I inserted and it began to play.

‘Oh great,' she said and sang the chorus bit. ‘Where is this plane? It's pretty amazing I guess.'

‘It's here, at the end of the airstrip off from the ruined chapel. The guy that was in it died.'

‘Aye?'

‘Aye,' I said. ‘He bashed into another plane when they were flying round the airfield at night when you shouldn't be doing that. There are no landing lights on this strip. They were both experienced pilots; should have known. They'd had dinner up in the Observation Lounge: some wine, glass of brandy, girlfriends to impress, so they dared each other. The aircraft in the lead, it came down on the field you crossed today, this one came down in the water. They never found the body, gave up the search then; weirdly, months later, they found the guy way up the hillside, you passed it as well, the spot they found his body.'

‘Had he fallen out the sky there?'

‘No, that would be impossible, he'd died of exposure. It
was winter weather like this when they crashed; somehow he got out the wreckage and swam ashore. He must've been terribly concussed or disorientated. He could have walked right here. This was his hotel room; he could have walked it in ten minutes, but he climbed right up the open hillside and must've died up there. He crossed three barbed-wire fences. He must have thought he was on the other side of the Sound or something, God knows. I've lain for ten years trying to work it out; it's tragic to get out of a mess like that,' I pointed to the screen, ‘And die of the cold up a hill.'

She humped her shoulders, ‘This was his room?' She looked round at me.

I nodded, ‘Want to see a picture of him?'

‘A picture of him; what, after he'd swum ashore and gone up there?'

‘Yes.'

‘You mean a photo of his rotted body?'

‘I have the police photos if you're interested, you being bored and all.'

She shifted on the bed a little; then, in a new, clearer, challenging voice, ‘Show me.'

I opened the drawer, took out the envelope, polished by hands, dropped it on the bed beside her. She slid them out and I was pleased to see the worst one was on the top, the shirt undone showing the dark drop inside, through the ribcage. She slid it out and put it to the back then flipped through the others.

‘Hoody crows,' I smiled.

She nodded then suddenly held up the skull-faced black
eyes and pointed to the man kneeling beside, hair longer: Brotherhood . . . She gave a grimace.

‘Pilot lay there five months, some hill-walkers found him. Brotherhood was over on holiday before he came back to run this place.'

‘Tell you what I think. Put the CD on again. My plane comes down in the night-darkness, aye?'

‘Right.'

‘I scramble out the plane and in the sheer pitch blacknesses I manage to swim ashore.'

‘You're the expert.'

She folded up her very smooth forehead at me. ‘News travels fast on this island.'

I hunched my shoulders.

‘When I get ashore – and it's hard to know what way to swim in the dark towards shore unless you spot some kind of light, headlights on the road maybe – then,
why
did he cross the road?'

I smiled at her.

‘Now, I've seen those flashing lights out on the rocks there and I'm sure he saw them too, if they'd been built ten year ago?'

‘They had yes.'

‘So he'd gumption enough to use them to swim in. He knew exact where he was. Now this is where it gets interesting. If you come ashore in that darkness, and I've done it; it crosses your mind you're back from the dead. Ever read
Pincher Martin
?'

‘Yes.'

‘You feel an excitement. I'd come ashore with some daft wee child. It'd crossed my mind if she wasn't with me I'd be free. Free to vanish. It's an incredible feeling. Your man had come back from the dead. His plane had crashed into another and fallen to the sea. When he got on the stones of the shore he wanted to use that power. That choice to be dead, to be ghost, escape off the island somehow, start a new life; so in first flush he takes wide strides up the hillsides . . .'

‘Within twenty minutes of the planes crashing they started searching the hillsides with torches . . .!' I said, excitedly.

‘Right, right, so he's hiding up there, still trying to make that decision to step over to the other side. To get vanished. He has family, people he's convinced himself he loved. He flies, so he has money, so he's a bastard, yes?'

‘Well . . . not everyone . . .'

‘You can fly a plane, eh? You must if you investigate . . .'

‘Ah. I don't actually. I can't fly, I'm more on the engineering side. Brotherhood flies.'

‘Point made. So this guy has house, car, wife, family, a lover, all the usual crap; playing little boys in aeroplanes. But up there he faces the first real decision of his life. Choose himself for the first time or . . . he can see the torches now, all he needs to do is walk down to the hotel. He's shivering now. It's bitter, bitter up there, he sees the light calling him back to the world but it's one of lies. Lies.'

I said, whisperedly, ‘He chose himself but it was death.'

‘Aye, so. How about a bit of telly?'

I leaned in with the remote but as I flicked from station to station each was a flurry of white dots.

The girl said, ‘Oh, noo! Don't believe it, it's out again!'

‘Aerial is always going in this weather.'

‘Aye. Met the guys who fix it, a team of them were on the wee ferry that sunk, what a crew, chuck them in a barrel of tits and they'd come out sucking their thumbs.'

I said, ‘Ah, that pilot, from the hillside where he rotted, that one's buried in the graveyard over by the river mouth.'

‘Oh. Right. What's his name?'

‘Carlton. William Carlton.'

‘Right. Any chance of borrowing your ghetto-blaster there. My Walkman got cabbaged in my wee capsizing.'

‘If you do me a favour in return,' I said, and I saw her head keep deliberately still but she'd seen the one-inch-open patio door where the crisp corner-curled net curtain was hanging back.

‘What?'

‘Stay here your three nights. Gawp at the circus and try to keep out of Brotherhood's schemes – whatever you get your kicks from – then get your schoolgirl's arse out of this place and never come back.'

She carried on staring at me then said, rapidly, ‘And I thought you were a goody. Why
should
I?'

‘You'd have a nicer time in other places.'

‘Threat?'

‘You know.'

She laughed but it wasn't convincing, ‘You're really starting to interest me, Mr Civil Servant Man.'

‘Don't take the piss, Kylie Minogue. You're out your league in Drome Hotel.'

She stood up and made for the door. ‘Does our deal stand?'

‘For three nights as loud as I want but your CD.'

‘Three nights . . . to start with,' she said and definitely did not do any looking back.

I took off my clothes and climbed into bed. I let the CD music run on; it was some young-sounding band, moaning on with a real enthusiasm. These young pessimists; what a joke – all day long they lament the darkness of the universe then drink all night and at six a.m. you can bet they won't be shitting a peptic ulcer out their still-tight arseholes. They want everything – even the right to pessimism; they won't accept it's a pleasure reserved for those of us over thirty.

I pulled up the sheet round me, holding its edges as if another human being was in bed with me. I thought of the only dream I would have: cigars . . . Havanas . . . The Real Thing. I took pleasure in my drowsiness with that relish for the simplistic found in most doomed men.

FROM MY NOTES
of that day:

8 a.m. That drugged-out alcoholic's helicopter passed over the runway with a large grizzly bear dangling beneath in a netting.

Stool: colicky/green. Certainly no darkenings of blood from a – for instance – ruptured rectum.

In the afternoon I had to walk to that old bastard Gibbon's Acres to barter for the left cabin door of Hotel Charlie. There was no sign of the Newcomer around the hotel.

Smoke-like mist was tight down on the low slopes of 96-Metre Hill above me. Across the Sound the ragged, torn line of vapour ran along the mountain range. I tugged up the hood on the functional jacket then trotted down to the shore, legging up shingle until I had walked along as far as I could at the rocks. I stepped up onto the Big Road verge. Because of the hood, my view to the rear had been obscured for so long that when I finally turned around, with a shock, the view I thought so familiar to me seemed suddenly foreign, as if I were seeing it for the first time. As if my experiences pacing
out the dimensions of every metre on the runway were simply rehearsal.

The mile of shoreline to the delta beyond the graveyard, the slow-moving tidal waters of the Sound, the hotel, its outbuildings, the boathouse where I was re-constructing the two doomed planes, the Celtic crosses of the ruined chapel among the pine plantation by the airfield: all these constituted my universe and my future. But my familiarity with those dimensions, every piece of earth covered by my own feet – that certainty was gone for a bewildering instant, then just as suddenly it leapt back to me and I recognised this land I saw. I frowned and walked on.

Mr and Mrs Heapie passed in their ancient Austin and I nodded grudgingly. Joe the Coal passed in his ex-Army Bedford and I waved.

The jacket was heavy with drizzle when I reached the long, puddled dirt track to Gibbon's farmhouse. Old Gibbon was working in the outhouse itself with a clown: the Knifegrinder. I walked to the side wall: the lower sections of the bizarre barn were constructed out of heavy railway sleepers, which in itself was unusual because there was never a railway on the island, save the miniature affair along at the military zoo. Cheap plywood had been nailed onto the sleepers and now warps and curls were prising gaps of light between the boards. Gibbon had been delighted to find an economical way to get a lick of something waterproof to douse the boards. He'd been too mean to buy paint: when the biscuit bakery at Far Places had gone bust, Gibbon had taken away gallons of raspberry food-colouring from the
auction. To his amazement, the stuff was completely waterproof; the lower sections of the outhouse were soon crucially pink: raspberry pink. As a paint it proved sturdy enough but the outhouse's downfall came when Gibbon's cattle strayed from the fields into the yard and began licking the walls. Not only did they remove all the colouring up to five feet round the structure, the constant licking and pushing of the cattle wrecked sections of the walls and Gibbon had to fence off the outhouse to keep it from destruction.

I crossed the muddied yard. The upper sections of the building, where the cabin door to Hotel Charlie was incorporated, was a hodge-podge of corrugated iron, the side walls of a caravan, plastic greenhousing material, unidentifiable sheets of metal and see-through plastic and even an old island road sign, so a large side section of the wall read: